Why We Should Care About Podcast Preservation
Hot Pod’s Interview with Molly Schwartz
We are fiercely proud of the interview that our Studio Manager, Molly Schwartz, gave to Nick Quah on the podcast industry newsletter Hot Pod. We’re glad to see that Molly’s podcast preservation project is reaching producers who are in the position to bake preservation practices into their workflows.
Molly recently wrote about METRO’s new grant-funded project that will help podcasters make sure their work doesn’t disappear. We received $142,000 in grant funding from the The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help independent podcasters protect their work against the threats of digital decay. The grant, titled “Preserve this Podcast: A Podcast Tutorial and Outreach Project,” will fund an education and awareness campaign to promote affordable, easy-to-implement archival techniques for digital audio preservation.
This project will be led by a team of experts, including Led by Mary Kidd, Systems and Operations Coordinator at New York Public Library (NYPL), Dana Gerber-Margie, an Information Professional at the IT help desk at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Molly herself.
We’re sharing Molly’s interview here on The Bytegeist Blog, with thanks to Nick for highlighting this important work.
Could you illustrate to me why media — in this case, podcast — preservation is important?
We live in a time of media abundance. It’s like an embarrassment of riches. There are conflicting opinions about whether or not the information explosion ushered in by the digital technologies of the 20th century is a good thing, but value judgments are kind of beside the point. We need to be aware that, in the same way that new software and devices make it easier and faster to put content out there, new technology comes with corresponding updates and obsolescence that threaten the endurance of the content that flows across it.
Does the meaning of a podcast lie in the fact that I’m accessing via an RSS feed that’s hosted by SoundCloud that I listen to on the podcast app on my iPhone? No. I listen to it for the human voices and stories, because it captures my imagination or teaches me new things or makes me feel more connected to other humans. But, is my ability to access these stories dependent on all these pieces of technology working together? Absolutely. As soon as one piece breaks down — SoundCloud goes out of business, or Apple podcasts are replaced by a proprietary audio streaming service, or we all replace our iPhones with Google glasses, or whatever — then I might not be able access the audio stories I want to listen to. And as time goes on it’s inevitable that pieces of the technology chain will break down. History has shown us this much. We are facing a magnetic media crisis where we are about to lose all the audio and video media that were recorded onto magnetic tape (audio cassettes, VHS’s, betacams, u-matic tapes, miniDVs, you name it). Born-digital audio, like podcasts, will face similar challenges.
People have put so much time and effort into crafting and sharing audio stories via podcasts. I’m hoping for a future in which we can reach back and find audio stories that we want to listen to, regardless of whether we are accessing them via some VR simulator or AI wetware embedded in our brains or vinyl records. Our archives and museums and libraries are full of books and movies and images from the past that add richness to our lives. Some of my favorite books are over 100 years old. Some of my favorite music is over 50 years old. I think it’s safe to say that 50 years from now people will enjoy listening to podcasts that we’re creating now. That’s what we’re working for.
According to your announcement post, it seems there exists a basic lack of preservation practices among most podcast publishers. Why do you think this is the case?
I think there are a couple of factors playing into a lack of awareness about preservation, both among podcast publishers and in the general public. Firstly, we live in a culture that fetishizes newness. We tend to prioritize new technologies and new projects over the maintenance of old ones. Most people aren’t thinking about media from an archival perspective. They are working on tight production schedules, and the priority is to get new pieces published rather than worry about how people will access their work 10 years from now.
Which brings me to my second point: the invisibility of archival work. A lot of people don’t know or think about archives — what their purpose is, who maintains them. Too frequently archival collections are literally stuck in the basement, and archivists are often the first to get fired during budget cuts. And this is partly the fault of archivists. We haven’t done enough effective outreach to help people understand what preservation practices look like and why they’re important. That’s part of the purpose of this project. To connect archivists and content creators, so that they can work together from the outset.
Archivists approach media with particular values. Values of authenticity, preservation, context, and long-term access. It’s not everybody’s job to care about these things or to know how the technical tools work, like Digital Asset Management systems, etc. But content creators should be aware that there are basic steps they can take to share their work with future generations. And if they have problems or questions, there are archivists out there who would be happy to help.
My third point relates to the nature of born-digital media. Podcasts are born-digital. They are recorded as digital audio files. People access them on digital audio players. I think there are a few misconceptions floating around about digital media. People seem to think that once things go online they somehow become ubiquitous. Podcasts feel like social media, like they’re everywhere because you can find them on many different podcatchers. But they all originate from one RSS feed, and if that feed goes down and the files aren’t backed up anywhere, then the content is lost. Or if the RSS feed goes down and the files are stored on someone’s local computer, then it’s not accessible to a wider public.
We’ve been conditioned by Google to think that things we want to find will be indexed and searchable, forever. Not everything is indexed. Not everything is searchable. Not everything is stored in a file format that will last. Not everything is stored on a platform that will last. The cheap cloud storage options — like Google Drive and Dropbox and Amazon Web Services — these are all commercial platforms. They will die if they become financially unsustainable. Do they provide guarantees that they will export your data if they go under? Or ensure fixity of your files over time? Probably not, because that’s not their mission. So we need to take the responsibility on ourselves to prioritize preservation if it’s something that matters to us.
Could you tell me about the other challenges that media preservation faces in general?
Media preservation faces loads of challenges: software gets outdated, hardware becomes obsolete, files get disorganized, storage gets expensive (especially for uncompressed files), bits rot over time, files get corrupted. And these problems only crop up when people start prioritizing media preservation, which isn’t generally the case. I honestly think one of the biggest challenges is a lack of awareness. Many media organizations can’t afford, or don’t prioritize, having an archivist (or a team of archivists) on staff to focus on preservation. And media is increasingly created by independent producers and freelancers who don’t have an institution behind them to help provide preservation infrastructures.
Do you see this lack of practices present equally among independent publishers vs. bigger publishers? Or is it more lopsided in either direction?
Podcasts are definitely at an advantage if they are associated with a larger network or institution. The publishers don’t have to be corporate. Public media has a long legacy of in-house archives. WNYC, for example, has an archives with archivists on staff who are responsible for the ingest, organization, preservation, and access databases of content created at WNYC. There are requirements to save records at organizations that are funded by the public.
I’m not sure that some of the corporate podcast networks, which are generally quite young, have many preservation practices in place. They are probably thinking about it as digital asset management, which is a huge chunk of preservation work. Sometimes people think about preservation in terms of preserving historic houses or something, but most digital preservation work isn’t about reconstructing damaged files. It’s doing the asset management work in advance to make sure all of your files are organized and well labeled. But this might not be a top priority at new podcast networks where they are just trying to get shows produced and out there.
For independent publishers, oftentimes people are just winging it and figuring out the technology as they go. They are focused on the content and the stories that they want to put out there, as they should be. We are trying to help make independent publishers aware of the tools available to them to incorporate preservation practices into their routine. I know this is challenging. I started a podcast a little over a year ago, and my own preservation practices are non-existent. That’s part of what inspired this project. I was thinking, if I’m a trained archivist and I’m not even putting my files in the Internet Archive, then how can we expect other people to do this? So this podcast will be documenting my own journey toward peak podcast preservation. And I want others to be able to follow along and fix their own preservation practices with me.
Let’s say we get to a point where podcast preservation practices are well-established and we have some sort of cultural institution that functions as the central point of such efforts. Is there a challenge of balancing between choosing what programs are “historically important” and not important enough? How have cultural heritage institutions grappled with this in the past?
Yes, there’s always a point where institutions are making value judgments about what to save and what to get rid of. Preservation is expensive. Digital preservation is really expensive. And the ease of creating digital information has led to an information explosion, or overload. We don’t need to save every tweet or every email. A big part of an archivist’s job is weeding, or deciding what not to keep. So if cultural heritage institutions do start collecting podcasts on a wider scale, as I hope they will, they will need to make calls about what is important enough to put resources toward saving. That’s why collections policiesare so important. Institutions need to decide what their purpose is and what’s in scope for them. Who is their audience? It’s a big responsibility that institutions have taken on, more or less successfully.
But, we are taking more of a personal digital archiving approach here, i.e. helping people save their own things. This has become a trend where archivists teach people how to organize and preserve their own digital content, like digital photos, for example. Digital information is really complicated and people need some tools and techniques. We are looking more immediately at helping podcast creators at least getting their files saved in multiple locations, as uncompressed files, and with good metadata and labels. We hope that this has the effect that the historical record is more democratized, and not totally at the mercy of collecting institutions, who might prioritize more privileged, or visible, communities and their content. I like the idea of empowering people to decide what they would like to save and how they would like to be remembered.
For whom is media preservation?
Media preservation is for everyone. At least, it’s preserved for anyone and everyone to access later on. There’s not a target audience. We can’t foresee how or why people will want to access podcasts, or data about podcasts, in the future. That’s kind of the beauty of it. Maybe a media scholar will want to do a cultural analysis of the switch to on-demand listening habits. Maybe the New Yorker will want to write an article about the true crime podcast phenomenon of 2016. Maybe someone will stumble upon Vicki Bennett and get inspired to make audio collages. Maybe someone’s grandchildren will want to hear the sound of their voice. If we don’t save the files with their corresponding metadata, then it’ll all be a moot point.
